The Personality of a Criminal in Criminological Studies of the Soviet Period

The paper describes the evolution of the views of Soviet criminologists on such element of its object as the personality of a criminal. As the anthropological approach to the personality of a criminal was dominant in the criminology of the pre-Soviet period, the first Soviet criminological studies of criminal personality were based on viewing a criminal as a person with metal deviations which should be corrected therapeutically. It is noted that the social character of the Marxist doctrine, its understanding of crime as a legacy of the exploitative society, as well as the fallacy of substituting the personality of a criminal by a that of a person who committed publically dangerous acts due to mental deviations in the early Soviet criminological studies led to the termination of such research. After the renaissance of criminological studies in mid-1960s, the personality of a criminal was not immediately included in the object of criminology as an independent element. The author singles out three approaches to researching the personality of a criminal in Soviet criminology: the psychological approach that identifies certain psychological features in the personality of a criminal (defects of legal consciousness, distortions of the value system, etc) or defines a criminal as a person alienated from society; the bio-social approach that characterizes a criminal as person who is genetically or psycho-pathologically predisposed to crime and who acts on this predisposition in an unfavorable social environment. It is concluded that, in the modern period, these approaches have created a basis for a complex study of the personality of a criminal, according to which it is viewed as an aggregate of social, biological and psychological features.